Do-Over
Voting in America
In 2014, I went to Brazil for the World Cup. I landed in Sao Paulo only to realize that the airline had misplaced my bags. I end up sitting in this room waiting until they figure out where the bags were at. There were 30 other people in this lost and found room. I sat across from a guy and his wife. They both had Costa Rica T-shirts on and they noticed I had a White Sox hat (I just like their logo, I'm a Cubs fan). They asked if I'm from Chicago. I was surprised they spoke English because almost nobody in that room was speaking English. It turns out this couple was from Arizona but spent some time in Chicago.
How else do complete strangers in a foreign country feel like family without the concept of nationalism?
I later learned that in Brazil, voting is a mandatory civil duty. That's almost a forced style of patriotism. There's pros and cons to this. I often wonder why we don’t make voting mandatory in America. It never dawned on me that voting for some segments of our population is an extremely difficult task. It always struck me as a nuisance, but not an arduous task. I've gone through phases of why it's important to vote. What I've concluded, at this age, is that voting is actually most effective when other people know you voted. It’s very similar to wearing a mask. It improves the peace of mind for everyone else and reinforces the importance of it. Very much like a network effect. Voting would suck if you knew you were the only person doing it. The organic consequence of knowing someone voted almost ensures the next person’s responsibility of voting.
As we're approaching yet another election, I have been a bit concerned about how packed polling places can and will get. In an age where gathering of any sort is a threat to national safety, you can’t help but wonder why we haven’t made any progress since 2016 to voting online.
What makes me weary about America is how it's bones are constructed. I sometimes wonder that if we were to start some things over, they’d look considerably different? If America got a chance to reconfigure the voting process, would it be solely online right now? It seems like the most obvious improvement.
There’s seems to be one deterent: corporate behemoths. The United States tech companies are single reason the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was created in the EU. And also the sole reason, the case of antitrust practices is being made in this very moment in time.
America has a very strange relationship with private and public partnerships. The internet, for instance, was an invention that was catalyzed by another invention. The government hired a third party organization, the RAND (Research and Development) Corporation, to do some National Defense work. This same company went to the telecom behemoth and downright monopoly: AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph). AT&T basically had the chance to own the internet had they not let hubris get in the way. They had the infrastructure in place, the government was willing to pay them to build on top of this the infrastructure of what today is the railways that make up what we know as the internet. If AT&T took the deal to build the early iterations of internet in the 1960s then they would've owned the railways of the internet.
Later on in the next decade, America had slapped a ton of antitrust rulings on them. Claiming they were too big and needed to be broken up. These antitrust policies still stand today. Fast forward to today and we are seeing the same exact debates going on with modern day behomoths of Facebook, Google and Amazon.
I’m not here to claim that these American companies have a civic duty. However, if we can give Kodak $765 Million under the auspices of the Defense Production Act, we should be able to ask behemoth organizations that have an enumerable amount of information on us, to perform this task that would seem in the realm of possibility for them. If these companies can ensure we are who we say were are already, it would seem plausible that the technology is available. Therefore, as Shakespeare once claimed, the readiness is all.
The one act that makes Americans feel American is voting. It gives the impression of polity. In an election as pivotal as 2020, it’s a bit shocking that we have not sought means to leverage the technology and proprietary abilities that these major corporations have for the good of the democratic process. No two industries (telecom and propriety content providers) know more about anyone else on Earth.
If we knew then what we know now, there’s no way we'd give these organizations the latitude to exist and function in the way that they did. But we’re past that stage.
Imagine an independent site, owned by the government, but built and operated by a contracted behemoth. We would use the services of behemoths to authenticate everyone’s identity. This would eliminate having to leave work, travel, organize car pools, waiting in line, early voting, absentee voting, purchasing an ID card and countless other hurdles.
This may sound like a pipe dream. But it's not that far off from what some in other countries have built. In fact, there have been three European countries that have taken this initiative seriously (Australia, Norway, Estonia) . The most notable being Estonia that has been conducting online voting since 2005. That’s right - for the last fifteen years, if you wanted, you could vote on the internet in Estonia as a citizen. Estonia benefits more than any other country because they’ve solved the issue of authentication. Every Estonian citizen has an national ID on the internet. So the government actually knows more about your internet behavior than Google.
In the U.S., corporations move first to innovation and then buy the government's ability to keep it's mouth shut through lobby dollars. That will always be an issue in America. But these facts shouldn’t lend themselves to the conclusion that willing and able voters not having the resources to do this very simple act.
In a very critical election, it would just be nice to know that the only deterrent to voting was digital literacy. Not infrastructures of oppression like legislation that complicates voter registration, polling locations closing, and the dreaded mail in systems run by USPS. Our nation is better when it resembles that of our highest ideas of a functioning society. If a failing photography company is entrusted with creating products to service pandemic recovery, we can entrust wildly successful, overachieving technology companies with tasks that they do every day to make money.